Don't Worship at the Altar of Andrew Marshall

Don't Worship at the Altar of Andrew Marshall

Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts’s The Last Warrior seeks to canonize longtime Defense Department strategist Andrew Marshall. But his record was far more mixed than his incense burners are prepared to admit.

I FIRST met Andrew Marshall, the longtime director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), in the mid-1990s. The occasion was one of the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s “Strategy and National Security” conferences at the Wianno Club on Cape Cod. A number of Huntington’s students, including Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg and my Olin Institute for Strategic Studies colleague Stephen Rosen, were also Marshall protégés—alumni of St. Andrew’s Prep, as they referred to themselves—having spent some of their careers under his tutelage in the ONA.

The conference gave me my first taste of the reverence with which they held Marshall. Rosen had arranged to recognize him at the dinner for the thirty or so national-security experts in attendance and had carefully selected a memento to mark the event. It was a handsomely framed print of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting of François Leclerc du Tremblay, the Capuchin monk who was Cardinal Richelieu’s alter ego. Du Tremblay was so influential that French courtiers referred to him as his “Gray Eminence,” in deference to the authority he reputedly exercised behind the scenes belied only by the color of his humble friar’s habit.

It thus does not come as a surprise that in their new book The Last Warrior , two more St. Andrew’s alums, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, adopt a similarly reverential tone. They trace the arc of Marshall’s career, beginning with his early days at the newly established RAND Corporation through his founding in 1973 and long-term directorship of the ONA, from which he is slated to retire in 2015 after sixty-five years of U.S. government service. He was, they tell us, “an intellectual giant comparable to such nuclear strategists as Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and Albert Wohlstetter,” and was one of the most visionary thinkers of the post–Cold War era by virtue of his advocacy of the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA).

With their worshipful tone and appropriation of the parochial-school designation for Marshall’s coterie, the authors invite comparisons with the doctrines of the Catholic Church. To my well-catechized eye, it all resembles the panegyrics in The Lives of the Saints that I dutifully absorbed as a child. Unlike the biographies by the Roman pagan Plutarch in his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans upon which they are modeled, The Lives of the Saints are short, easily digestible biographies of the holy men and women of the church that offer tutelage in moral sanctity rather than a searching chronicle. They accomplish this hortatory task by emphasizing the saints’ virtues and glossing over, or passing over altogether, the less edifying aspects of their lives.

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Here the case for canonization rests on two grounds. First, Krepinevich and Watts aver that Marshall has been involved in nearly every momentous national-security decision since the Manhattan Project, beginning as an economics graduate student laboring alongside physicist Enrico Fermi to repair the University of Chicago’s cyclotron and later staying up until all hours with his RAND colleague Herman Kahn running the Monte Carlo simulations of radiation flows that “paid off” in the 1952 Eniwetok H-bomb explosion. His strategic acuity, we are instructed, was such that early on he diagnosed the weaknesses of Warsaw Pact conventional forces and challenged the “exaggerated threat” to NATO in the intelligence community’s “worst-case” assessments. He also presciently anticipated the easy U.S. victory over Iraq in 1991, harbored doubts about the George W. Bush administration’s plans for war in Iraq in 2003 and espoused a rebalancing toward Asia to counter growing Chinese military power. Such a record of strategic sagacity demonstrates that Marshall was endowed with the ability to “peer further into the future than most others in the U.S. government.”

Second, unlike the rest of the national-security bureaucracy, which is prisoner to a “conventional, but often self-serving, wisdom,” Marshall was a heroic figure who rose above parochial interest and perceptively limned the contours of the security challenges the United States has faced since the beginning of the Cold War. Marshall “was—and remains—a pragmatic strategist who has consistently looked further into the future and focused more on the first-order problems of long-term competition in peacetime than those around him.” Given that, Krepinevich and Watts maintain that “Pentagon decision makers would do well to take Marshall’s views to heart. His observations on such matters over three score years reveal a brilliant strategic mind with an uncanny ability to peer into the long-term future and see the situation ‘plain’—for what it is—more clearly than most around him.”

Given the general tenor of this work, there is another Roman Catholic institution that it seems appropriate to invoke for a, well, net assessment of Marshall himself. Until quite recently, the Vatican team analyzing the case for the canonization of a potential saint included not only its proponents but also a canon lawyer whose job it was to make the best case possible in opposition. Alas, the institution of the advocatus diaboli is now largely defunct. Nonetheless, I propose that, at least for the purposes of reviewing Marshall’s career, we resurrect it and ask a pertinent question: How would the devil’s advocate view it?